FatWallet Accused Of DMCA Violation

from the going-too-far dept

This just keeps getting sillier and sillier. The latest ridiculous misuse of the DMCA is for a bunch of large retailers to gang up on FatWallet, one of the more well-known sites for finding out about shopping discounts, and forcing them to take down information about upcoming sales, saying that they own the copyright to those prices and publishing it is a violation of the DMCA. The response, of course, is that a price is a fact, and you can't copyright a fact. However, the retailers say that the "compilation of prices" represents an original work that is copywritable.